Issue 21 Electricity Spring 2006

Inventory / A Poet of Cloth

Brian Dillon

“Inventory” is a column that examines or presents a list, catalogue, or register.

All illustrations from H. Le Blanc's The Art of Tying the Cravat.

Lord Byron is said to have declared that of the two men he admired
most—Beau Brummell and Napoleon Bonaparte—he would rather have been the
dandy than the emperor. As a y­oung man, he scrupulously followed
Brummell's sartorial dicta, and was never seen without a white cravat.
(Napoleon wore a black neckcloth, a habit condemned by the Beau.) Byron
later abandoned his fastidiousness to the extent of having early
portraits overpainted with an open-necked shirt, but for a time he
embodied Brummell's philosophy: the maximum of luxury in the service of
minimal ostentation. Among the poet's papers, there survives a document
from 1805 that records Byron's requirements in the way of cloth for the
spring of that year: seventy-five yards of Irish linen, for shirts and
bedsheets; over four yards of French cambric, for shirt fronts;
Russia-towelling, for bath towels; and a quantity of damask linen, to
be made into nightshirts. Also: six nightcaps.1 Curiously,
no mention is made of the raw material for his cravats, the articles
that would later inspire Thomas Carlyle, in his Sartor Resartus, to satirize the dandy as "inspired with Cloth, a Poet of Cloth."

The aesthetic embodied in Brummell (1778-1840) is equal parts
asceticism and profligacy. The masculine attire he pioneered is notably
sober: a simple costume of dark coat and pale trousers, based on the
uniform of his former regiment, the Light Dragoons. As his biographer
Captain Jesse pronounced, gentlemanliness is an austere calling: a man
of quality, for example, ought never to admit to being thirsty or cold.
But the dandy's poise is swaddled in an argosy of rich fabrics; a
German prince, visiting London at the turn of the century, noted: "an
elegant then requires per week, twenty shirts, twenty-four pocket
handkerchiefs, nine or ten pairs of 'summer trousers,' thirty neck
handkerchiefs (unless he wears black ones), a dozen waistcoats,
stockings à discretion."
All of this to appear not to have taken much care in one's appearance
at all. In this sense, the dandy's dress code resembles the mechanism
of Brummell's wit. When he accosted a preening acquaintance with the
words, "Do you call this thing a coat?" or announced of a gouty limb,
"It's my favorite leg," he resisted the flourish of an aphorism or aperçu.
Rather, as William Hazlitt had it, Brummell's jokes exercise prodigious
thought to modest ends: "they hover on the very brink of vacancy, and
are in their shadowy composition next of kin to nonentities."2

Accordingly, reports of Brummell's jests and eccentricities often
differ in wording and detail. Accounts of his heyday as favorite of the
Prince Regent and flippant dictator of London fashions tend, however,
to agree on one episode: the moment when his valet Robinson emerged
from his master's dressing room laden with wrinkled cravats and
announced, "These are our failures." The disjecta membra
of the Beau's late-morning toilet had first been subjected to rigorous
testing. Jesse describes the process of putting on a cravat: "The
collar, which was always fixed to his shirt, was so large that, before
being folded down, it completely hid his head and face, and the white
neckcloth was at least a foot in height. The first coup d'archet
was made with the shirt collar, which he folded down to its proper
size; and Brummell then standing before the glass, with his chin poked
up to the ceiling, by the gentle and gradual declension of his jaw,
creased the cravat to reasonable dimensions, the form of each
succeeding crease being perfected with the shirt which he had just
discarded."3 The spectacle of this self-sculpture drew an
envious, admiring audience; they were watching the painful birth of
Brummell's most lasting and mysterious invention: the
nineteenth-century necktie.

By the time a number of quasi-comic cravat-tying manuals started to
appear, schooling the would-be gentleman in the complex significance of
different techniques, Brummell was already in disgrace in France,
having fallen from favor with the Prince Regent and gambled away most
of his money. His spirit survives, however, in the pages of Neckclothitania (by "one of the cloth"), published in 1818.4
Here, the author is first exercised by the distressing democratization
of modern costume: "It can hardly be imagined how political events
should, even in the remotest way, influence or affect the thermometer
of fashion, but it is nevertheless perfectly true that both the
American and French revolutions have totally changed it." Where
formerly the expense of finery ensured that one could tell a person of haut ton
from a pretender, the new simplicity of dress confounds such judgments,
and contemporary fashions seem to embody the notion of equality: "a
monstrous and unnatural supposition." Still, there are niceties of
attire by which one can spot a gentleman: chief among them, the style
of his cravat.

The numerous alternative knots are laid out in a
series of illustrations, each showing a disembodied cravat tied tightly
around an invisible throat. There is the Mathematical tie, with its
distinct three creases; the "pretty and easily formed" American; the
rather vulgar Horse Collar. There is the excruciating Oriental knot,
"made with a very stiff and rigid cloth, so that there cannot be the
least danger of its yielding or bending to the exertions of the head
and neck." So merciless is its stricture, and the head consequently so
elevated, that a wearer of the author's acquaintance, on being
introduced to a friend's diminutive aunt at a soirée, tripped over the
unseen lady, falling "headlong into the lap of an old dowager." Starch
is essential to almost all the styles listed, and white the favored
color, although alternatives are permitted. The American tie, which
"differs little from the Mathematical, except that the collateral
indentures do not extend so near to the ear," is best worn in "ocean
green." The most suitable color for the Osbaldstone is "ethereal
azure"; for the Trove d'Amour, "yeux de fille en extase"; for the
Mathematical, "la couleur de la cuisse d'une nymphe emue."5

The whole fanciful inventory is aired again in 1828 in H. Le Blanc's The Art of Tying the Cravat,
which details thirty-two styles, provides sixteen careful lessons in
tying, and appends "the latest Parisian improvements and
amplifications."6 The book was issued by Honoré de Balzac's
printers, and the novelist was suspected of having written it himself;
it now seems likely that it was the work of his friend Emile-Marc de
Saint-Hilaire. The pseudonymous author provides a short history of the
cravat: from the "chin cloth" worn by the Romans, through the origin of
the word itself in the uniform of Croat soldiers, to the recent history
of an article which had become so outlandish that "the neck was placed
on a level with the head, which in size it surpassed, and with which it
was confounded." The fashion for starch became so binding, says Le
Blanc, that "the head could only be turned by general consent of all
the members. ... The tout ensemble was that of an unfinished
statue." He then goes on to list the main styles now in circulation:
the cravat De Chasse, En Valise, Coquille, À la Colin, À la
Parresseuse, À l'Italien, À la Russe. He pauses to deprecate the
Jesuitique, which is a mere starched collar, "a cravat in appearance
only."

Despite this profusion of rules, all far too complex to
have impressed the Beau, there is one stipulation of Le Blanc's that he
has inherited directly from Brummell. Once tied, the necktie should
never be altered in the hope of improving its appearance; if it is
ill-tied, one must start again with a fresh cravat. What the wearer is
after is a "curious mean" (as Virginia Woolf wrote of Brummell's jokes)
between skill and pure chance. The tying of a cravat involves the
rigorous removal of human agency from the final appearance of the
fabric: the knot is intentional, but the folds are entirely fortuitous.
As Giorgio Agamben has put it, Brummell, "whom some of the greatest
poets of modernity have not disdained to consider their teacher, can,
from this point of view, claim as his own discovery the introduction of
chance into the artwork so widely practiced in contemporary art."7
Beau Brummell is a direct precursor of the dandy Marcel Duchamp. The
dandy's intention is in fact to make the garment-like the
artwork-evanesce into pure gesture, to institute something like the
"threadbare look" described by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly in his essay on
Brummell and dandyism. In a brief craze, says d'Aurevilly, dandies took
to rubbing their clothes with broken glass, till they took on the
appearance of lace, became "a mist of cloth," scarcely existed as
clothes.8 Similarly, at its logical extreme, a well-tied
cravat is a palpable immateriality, like a distant nebula or a puff of
ectoplasm.

At the end, Brummell himself communed with the
ghosts of his former finery. Penniless and in the final, maddening,
stages of tertiary syphilis, he imagined that he was entertaining
friends from his former life-but they were mere shadows. When the money
finally ran out, he acknowledged the seriousness of his predicament by
resorting to that hateful accessory, a black cravat. In her account of
Brummell's last days, Woolf writes: "Now that the pressure was removed,
the odds and ends, so trifling separately, so brilliant in combination,
which had made up the being of the Beau, fell asunder and revealed what
lay beneath." The perfect cravat, says the author of Neckclothitania
(well aware that the myriad knots he describes are only so many ways to
dress a phantom), is so rigid that it does not need to touch the neck
to stay in place. The body of the dandy may as well not be there.­

Neckclothitania or Tietania, Being an Essay on Starchers, by One of the Cloth (London: J. J. Stockdale, 1818).

These two phrases translate as "the eyes of a girl in ecstasy" and "the color of the trembling thigh of a nymph," respectively. The author of Neckclothitania resorts to French here, presumably in part because of the suggestive language.

Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet, and writes regularly for Frieze, The Financial
Times, and New Statesman. He is author of a memoir, In the Dark Room
(Penguin, 2005), and is working on a cultural history of hypochondria. He
lives in Canterbury.

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